Apple will discontinue shipping its long-neglected Mac Pro tower to the EU, EU candidates, and European Free Trade Association (EFTA) member states on March first, sources tell 9to5Mac.
According to that "Apple Intelligence" website, Cupertino has informed resellers that the Mac Pro is being retired from the aforementioned …

Re: Makes perfect sense

It's true, but it does result in their "pro" customers being stuffed.

People running Final Cut and Logic Studio. Plus what about app developers? they have to run a Mac to develop for iOS and while a lot of people do use laptops now, some professionals would choose a big tower machine.

Re: Makes perfect sense

Re:"it's actually a 'phone maker now" Might that be the explanation for their........

..........maniacal legal assault on their main rival in the industry over the last two years? If they have to an increasing degree bet the farm on the retail small mobile device market then they would be damn near terrified of Samsung's sales figures.

Re: Makes perfect sense @Dana

Not exactly, it's all about where the business is and what it does. Things change. MSFT is a software company, which doesn't mean to say that millions of x-boxes and some mice, keyboards etc don't exist. I doubt that will change any time soon.

IBM was a typewriter company, but now clearly isn't. I doubt Apple will drop its OSX based things, it's just that they are a relatively minor part of the business.

Re: Oh dear ....

> "Glad I bought one in 2009 although it cost £1900. Fantastic hardware and with a 256GB SSD running Windows 7 ultimate it's the dogs."

Ouch, that's painful as hell. Can't tell you how much hardware I could stuff into a build-it-myself box for £1900, or however many thousands that calculates into in US$. And I could stuff as many OS's on there as I bloody well pleased.

Re: Oh dear ....

It's true we on the East of the pond often lose out when prices are converted, but can you clarify your point about OSs? I would have thought that a Mac Pro can run as many legitimate OSs as any other Intel based machine, plus one. Or does that UEFI confuse some Linuxes? Or is it a driver availability issue?

Re: Oh dear ....

> "but can you clarify your point about OSs?"

Yeah, he said he was told he would have to leave OSX on in order to install Windows - what the hell? Certainly its not a UEFI issue, not on a 4-year old computer. Aside from some UEFI quirks, which are pretty simple to bypass, I know of no limits on the number of OS's that could be installed on a rig.

Re: Oh dear ....

Have you seen a Mac Pro? it's a really well designed piece of kit, very quiet too.

4 SATA drives can just be slidden in, no pissing about with cables. The RAM board pulls out so you can add RAM without buggering about pressing DIMMs into the motherboard while on your knees. Loads of slots for RAM modules too. Not the usual 4 you get on some boards.

Personally, I sold around 3 computers and replaced them all with one Mac Pro. I was using Linux for the Internet and Windows for music and creative purposes.

Re: Oh dear ....

> "4 SATA drives can just be slidden in, no pissing about with cables. The RAM board pulls out so you can add RAM without buggering about pressing DIMMs into the motherboard while on your knees. Loads of slots for RAM modules too. Not the usual 4 you get on some boards."

I was buying hot-swap hard drive bays in 1997 - what you are talking about is not anything unique to Apple products. My current, $180 motherboard has room for 8 sticks of ram. A well-built case and a well-designed motherboard is no reason to spend in excess of $2,000 on a tower - just my humble opinion.

Re: Oh dear ....

Late in 2010, for very considerably less than today's dollar exchange for 1900GBP, I built a system - Tyan server board, 2 Xeon 5630 processors, 24 GB memory, 3x500 GB SATA disks, PS, and case roomy enough to hold 3 or more additional disks. It was to be a server, so I used the onboard video, but with a high-end adapter it still would have cost significantly less than the Apple. The goal at the time was to see what I could do for about the cost of an Epson Equity III+ (12 MHz 286, 640K + 2M add-in memory, a 40MB disk, and a VGA card. I was so astonished that I bought the parts and built it.

Re: Oh dear ....

Re: Oh dear ....

I have an older Mac Pro and think it's a well made piece of kit. I have also built loads of PC's and servers but the Mac Pro is far, far better constructed than most PC"s I've seen. The attention to detail inside is like opening up a decent mid range P-series from IBM. Its quiet (mine is on 24x7), it can take 64GB of RAM (if you can afford it), four sata disks just slot in on the rails. I know you can buy plastic enclosures but these are simple, near and elegant. Its well put together and just works very nicely. Oh and I paid £600 for mine.

The downside is there is no USB 3, but we do have Firewire which is still excellent for music, videos and external hard disks, The graphics card is from something pre Noahs time in the flood, its OK (ish) but its bloody old and slow compared to just about anything else.

Apple have ignored this unit for too long as there focus is now on consumer electronics and not their older core background of graphics, music and desktop, thats where the money is so fair enough. However I wish they'd stop pretending that they are still a computer company as opposed to a phone make and music/video/games distribution company now.

I have zero faith in Tim Cook producing anything decent to replace the Mac Pro, to be honest I have zero faith in Tim Cook doing anything decent on most the Apple products.

I can't remember the last time Apple produced something that made me go wow! Shoving a high defn display on a laptop doesn't count.

Re: Oh dear .... @tom dial, Andy Prough

Re: Oh dear ....

What happens if you pull out the hard drives on your system? I bet it goes tits up. Pull the drives out of a mac pro and the desktop still functions, mouse and menus and clicking on stuff. Slide the drives back in and away you go.

It's a wonderful piece of kit that lasts for a decade or more. There are many good things about it, and the case is a lot better than any case you can buy anywhere else. If you don't like OSX then fair enough, that's your opinion.

It's just like an iPad is a bit more expensive than your bog standard chinese android tablet, but all the useability tests say it is miles ahead. 80% or more of the mobile browsing usage is on apple products. You pay a little bit more and you get better quality.

If you want to build your own machine then go ahead, it is a lot of fun, and you can mix, match and change everything that you want. A Mac Pro is obviously not for you.

Re: Oh dear ....

UL standards?

This appears to be a UL standard - wouldn't this affect more than just europe? just that a european trader got wind of it makes it sound like this is a european withdrawal for this product. Might be they have to discontinue this product as it stands...

Re: or this version?

Thanks. I'm glad you could be arsed researching and explaining. It seems it's too much to expect the Reg's 'journalists' to do anything more than copy/paste from other websites, or reprint press releases, these days.

This is what most PC users miss out on - the Mac Pro case really is very good, and a real step above even the premium PC cases.

Admittedly, having control of the internals makes this easy to achieve, but there you go - still doesn't detract from the fact this is one of the best cases to work on, and is extremely quiet for what it is, even with 2 video cards.

Downsides? Weighs a frikkin' ton, and the Aluminium can get scored easily. Oh and it's "thirsty" - I think it's a 850w PSU in there, and it like a bit of juice. Biggest failing of all though, was Apple never gave it the video system it should have had all along, especially at this price; witness the number of users flashing top end PC cards from ATi and AMD to slot in there. No Crossfire either in OS X when it could easily have been supported (it works in Windows/bootcamp).

Those of you "ripping out" OS X

I take it you do not like UNIX, because that's what you are removing, one of the last real UNIXes, fast, efficient and authentic. Then, I suppose you replace it with a not that well implemented copy - some version of Linux - then spend your spare time trying to find libraries and drivers to emulate the default functionality of the software you removed because you are so clever.

Makes one despair and just shows that the true technical level of many of the contributors here is rather lower than they imagine.

Re: Mac Pro case

I bought the MacPro hexacore with 512SSD last year after my admin turned down my request for a MacMini server!! (but said I could buy a 'pro with 27"ACD??) It's a dream machine.... I have a 'faster' HP workstation with 30" HP wall of text but it feels slower, even though the HP chugs thru' cinibenchmarks faster.

The argument leading to the EOL of the current MP seems to be over big fans and no finger-guards. Shirley you'd have to open up the side-case for this finger-snapping problem to be evident? on my machine that would involve cracking the 4 digit luggage lock on the jobsian arty flip-out lock-thing...

in the UK if you're desperate to have a big lump of aluminium that can't actually receive Wi-Fi you could do worse than snap-up one of the last refurb MP's at the usual site FC560B/A/refurbished-mac-pro-28ghz-quad-core-intel-xeon where Apple would graciously bestow upon you a whole three gigs of ECC RAM for £1489...

Yet more overreaching EU regulations

"The argument leading to the EOL of the current MP seems to be over big fans and no finger-guards. "

In other news, jumping in front a car can cause injury. Maybe we should put 8' fences along the sides of all roads?

This is exactly the kind of thing that is pushing more and more Britons to want out of the EU nanny state. The only access to the fans is when the door is open, when you should have the computer off anyway. Should we put more guards on desk fans so when you open them to clean them, you cant cut your fingers? >.> What a total load of tripe.

Re: Yet more overreaching EU regulations

From what I recall in the US, UL listing required certain things to be "tool accessed required", so any case that didn't require some kind of tool (i.e. a screwdriver) fails. If that is the situation here, then the virtues of having all that easy access is the problem.

While it's trivial to rant about the alleged "nanny state", in fact you'll get the opposite arguments about "dangerous products", and with more justification. At the end of the day, although vendors like to blame these kinds of safety standards for any inconvenience, in practice they like having a standard to comply with because IF something bad happens to a customer, they can point to the regulation and assert that they couldn't be to blame because they comply...

Re: Yet more overreaching EU regulations (@Rawr)

As noted above, and in its name, the relevant standard is international, emanating from an industry-recognised body based in Illinois. So the alternative position would have been "everyone in the industry uses this standard, but we know better because we're politicians". I suspect that position is more in disagreement with most people's political leanings than whatever you're accusing.

So what do we make Apple's advice to replace XServes with Mac Pros now?

This is something I consistently fail to understand.

A long long time ago, Apple built a reputation of being THE choice for professional graphics and later audio processing. That reputation trickled down to the regular consumer who would be convinced by such arguments a 'professionals won't use anything else'.

It's akin to Land Rover are selling loads of upmarket wimpmobiles on the reputation they built crossing the Darien Gap and things like the Camel Trophy.

But now Apple (AND land Rover) are neglecting the products that made their reputation and seem only interested in selling as many silly consumer products as they can.and are neglecting the people that built their image.

I cannot see anything good coming from this attitude. But I have no multinational corp to run either.

Re: This is something I consistently fail to understand.

Re: This is something I consistently fail to understand.

You're close with the Landie analogy. But how about this:

Mac Pro's are used by designers in the same way 90's are used by farmers and explorers. They buy one, run it to the ground, then buy another. They are the perfect customers, returning to buy the same high-margin models again and again.

If they either stop selling the Mac Pro or the 90, both groups will simply leave, full of resentment, and never come back, regardless of the other tinsily tat they may try to sell in it's place. Of the two, only Landie seems to know this.

Re: This is something I consistently fail to understand.

>A long long time ago, Apple built a reputation of being THE choice for professional graphics and later audio processing.

Well, audio doesn't demand so much that most tasks can't be done on a modern Macbook, which then can be taken out round to mate's studio or on a gig- and they are pretty tough and quiet, too. Wireless MIDI and a low latency OS has been on iPhones since the first one.

Likewise, graphics applications.

Video editing is usually more about storage speed than it is about raw horsepower- done over the network or Thunderbolt if you must- though I'm sure some After Effects users would take all they can get.

@Dan 55

"the Mac Pro's not going to be around for much longer anyway"

Possibly, or possibly they're already working on the replacement for it, for release sometime in the latter part of this year, and so have decided that there's no point reworking the current Mac Pro believing that anyone that really wants one will get one in the next few weeks, or from existing stocks, or import one.

Possibility that they will be able to bring up the release (or announcement) of the replacement too of course.

Be a shame if they stop making them

Hoping to buy one this year, my existing 8-core Pro is getting plenty long in the tooth now, my quad-i7 MBP gets raped by my plug-ins on Logic so to buy something stupidly powerful that will last me years is quite attractive even if it does come at a premium.

Love the Pro, Love the OS

I've got a 2010 Mac Pro, and it's the best damned machine I've ever owned. It's fast, it's capable - and it craps all over my home built PC that cost about the same to build. Actually, I'll fess. That isn't entirely fair. The PC matches it when running Linux - it's only as a Windows box that it fails, although I'll put that fail at Microsoft's door*. Multi-boot on the PC is still a fail though, whatever OS is installed, and something that the Mac Pro handles far more gracefully.

Anticipating the question 'Why do I have a home built PC if the Mac is so good', it's because I like to be (reasonably) well informed. I don't believe in offering opinions or prejudice on the basis of no experience. So I have a home built PC (giving me experience of the Windows side of the argument), a Mac (giving me experience of the Mac side of the argument) and assorted other bits and bobs including a Pi and a Chromebook (love the Chromebook, by the way - for minimalist computing, it's perfect).